Burps and belly rumbles

So far this has just been a duping ground for moans, groans and over exagerated injustices that have rained down on me. If you look close though, you might just find a post or two of opinion and not complaint.

Tuesday, 26 April 2016

All through my life I have been a fairly contented little chappy (teenage angst years aside), never the life and soul of a party but usually always in a good mood. Other people's opinions never really upset me, even if I held an opposing view. I have worked in bars for 26 years and my personality suited the job well, tolerant of others and blessed with a patience when most would be pulling their hair out. But the last couple of years have seen a change, a mental adjustment of how I see and possibly treat others. I'm not talking about looking for confrontation as I walk by someone on the street or any other extreme behaviour, but instead a slow, gentle erosion of some of the character traits I have always shown. Basically I get really pissed off, really quickly over stuff that has next to no bearing on my life. My patience has gone to be replaced by a sour grump.

I am putting this down to age and the erosion of manners that sometimes you see older people display. It could be quite as easily a product of the online, always connected digital age that we now live in and has produced so many keyboard warriors/critics/trolls but I kind of like the image of the grumpy old man better. By way of proof of my sedated descent into cantankerousness you only need to look at any of my social media feeds (or even this blog) and see the once hopeful and bright posts become almost acidic in their bitterness. My eternal optimism has left the building. I don't go as far as hate or anything that requires energy but rather just get really, really frustrated. These things/people/actions simultaneously get up my nose, on my wick and wind me up.

And what brings out this venom of annoyance? Trivial, mundane bollocks usually. Seldom is it anything that actually matters, for serious life affecting issues I still apply an analytical process (well, I usually do). We are talking issues that have zero bearing on my life, a watch strap for a watch I don't own, or an app for an OS I don't use. You have no idea how much these little insignificant things annoy the life out of me for no reason whatsoever.

I am posting this not as another moan, or even because I feel bad about it. I quite enjoy it at times, it can be fun. No, I am posting this for it's educational value. Most of anyone who might read this will be younger than I am (46 at last count, although I did think there was another year or two on that at one point) so I am simply letting you have a little look at what could be in store for you. A window to the future. Now ask yourself if as a comparative youngster you already have any of these traits, cause if so you're gonna be one miserable old fecker.

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

Despite half the civilised world giving OnePlus so big a cold shoulder after their 'unusual' maketing techniques of the One that they made Mr Freeze look like Johnny Storm overheating, and even thought they thought they would get lucky a second time with an invite system that grew to do more damage than good, I was at the front of the queue to buy a OnePlus Two. When I bought the device there were very few reviews on the net other than from sites getting in quick with first look posts. Scare stories were everywhere, some fuelled by the audacity of OnePlus not to include NFC and other growing from the inclusion of the much maligned SnapDroagon 810 SOC. Being honest the SOC did concern me a little, but the other hardware choices I was fine with (I think I have used NFC once for anything other than messing about since I had my first handset with the chip). I was also not overly fussed about the stock software as job number one for me is to unlock and root. I knew that there would be a dev community springing up for the Two within a few weeks once the invite system trickled down to the talented ROM developers who don't carry much clout with PR folks. Sadly I was wrong.

For all the time I had my OnePlus One I used custom ROM's of one flavour or another after the second or third day. Because the device had shipped with Cyanogen and they also provided a community build every ROM I tried had full hardware support. Some of the overly cusomisable ROM's might have had some little niggles with additional software features but that would have been the case accross pretty much every device the ROM was ported to. It's hard to say which company benefited most from the ill-fated partnership on the One but in some ways I think OnePlus are suffering more since it's end. Not taking into account the PR disaster for both of the very public fall out, OnePlus are currently missing a vital ingredient of any quality unit, a good ROM. Oxygen OS just doesnt cut it. I didn't try Oxygen on my OPO, and maybe if I had I would have bought the OP2 with lower expectations. The ROM has been buggy since the start and I can't bring myself to believe it will get better. If OnePlus are true to their words and update the fingerprint sensor firmware to the Google API when they finally release Marshmallow then I get the feeling that a LOT of users will desert their stock ROM for a CM based one, as currently it isn't supported.

In a fit of curiosity I flashed the other official OP2 ROM a couple of days ago, Hydrogen OS. Hydrogen is meant for the far east market, and not being a big fan of the IOS styled ROM's (MIUI, Emotion UI etc) I didn't hope for much. I was expecting a ROM with a launcher and settings layout I didn;t like and a repeat of the bugs found in Oxygen OS. What I got was something far different, a far smoother experience, with next to no bugs that I can tell.

Apart from being more stable, Hydrogen has some nice little features that are missing from the Oxygen ROM, and vice versa, some of the nice touches included in Oxygen are absent from Hydrogen. A lot of these little features don't directly impact on the core OS so it strikes me as strange that they are missing even as an option. I am guessing that their are two distinct software teams working for OnePlus, one each for Hydrogen OS and Oxygen OS. If that's the case are they in competition or do they just not confer and try each others work? Is there nobody at OnePlus HQ looking at the work of both teams and suggesting that some of these features should be in both ROM's? If it's the result of a single software team then that's even worse, why would you deem a feature to be useful in one ROM but not another? It makes no sense to me at all.

Now to be clear I am not talking about differences like the two gallery apps, one of which is very AOSP for the west and the other more like MIUI's offering for the east. That kind of makes sense as consumers have voted with their wallets in each of those regions to say what they want. Little things however, like the ability to delete a screenshot from the notification bar (present in the Oxygen ROM, but not on Hydrogen) make no sense at all. Even worse is the performance of the unit. Running a rooted Hydrogen in comarison to a rooted Oxygen ROM there is no comparison, Hydrogen wins hands down. I mentioned in the review I did for Land of Droid that occasionally I would get little stutters, not so much a lag in performance but rather a slight delay before it would kick into life. I put thisdown to the way OnePlus dealt with throtling on the 810 SOC but it just doesnt happen on Hydrogen, everything happens instantly. Another difference is the performance of the fingerprint sensor. I have been lucky I think as I have seen a few folk complain of very hit and miss results when using it. For me, if I made sure the sensor was kept clean my biggest issue was the physical placement of it. It sits in a little 'bowl', depresed below the surface of the front screen and the depth is made worse when using a screen protector (something the OP2 ships with) which I believed meant that my finger wasn;t always making a proper contact with it. It was also slow in comparison to other modern sensors. Imagine my surprise then to discover that while using Hydrogen the sensor works roughly twice as fast and hardly misses a touch. Obviously the placement isn't an issue at all (or a very minor one at most) but in fact the problem comes with the ROM. It's so far down the line now that something that big shouldn't even be mentioned anymore, it should have been fixed long ago. On the subject of the fingerprint sensor another nice touch in Hydrogen is that a bad scan produces a diferent haptic vibration than a succesful one, again this is missing in Oxygen. Add to these better app permissions, auto app start manager, hybernation features baked into the ROM and more it's hard to see why they let Oxygen ship. Hopefully with Android 6 they will get a better cohesion between the two flavours.

Hydrogen isn't without it's little quirks, but they are fewer and mostly able to be 'fixed'. Changing the launcher or installing a 3rd party app works for most of it. That's why until Marshmallow drops I will be using Hydrogen, and would recommend any OP2 user to try it out for themselves, even if you can't delete screenshots from the navigation bar.

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

So, I just realised I never completed the tale of the missing Honor 6 I won over Christmas, I guess I should put that right.

When we spoke last I had been contacted by Wilkin Lee from Honor to promise that they were on the case and would make good the prize's that I and others had won. True to their word, we did all receive our prizes and in jig time from Wilkin stepping in, but things also took another little twist from that point as well.

"When life gives you Lemons, Make Lemonade", and if you are really lucky you will have some Vodka in the back cupboard so that the Lemonade doesn't go to waste as well. The over extended wait without any information is without doubt the Lemons, the speedy response after my initial blog post about it has the bubbles of Lemonade, which just leaves the Vodka. The day after my initial contact with Wilkin he got in touch again, this time he had heard through a mutual friend that I was one of the organising team for March of the Droids and wondered if Honor could get involved. Our next event was in March so the timing was perfect for us.

I have since met Wilkin again, this time in Glasgow at an event held in conjunction with Skyscanner, another MotD supporter. If I could turn the clock back, I doubt I would change a thing, that initial cock up worked so well in my favour. I need to take my hat off to Wilkin, the guy has started a new job of promoting the Honor brand within the UK and instantly walked into a massive fuck up that meant instead of starting at zero, he was already in the negative, but he has engaged with the community and turned a full 180. Even if you never buy an Honor handset I recommend that you do follow them on social media and even join the Honor club & take a run along to one of the events they put on.